The Invisible Committee – Call [Audiobook]

The Invisible Committee – Call [Audiobook]

All it took was an afternoon of margaritas for us to muster the confidence to record. Enjoy!

[Soundcloud/Wordpress.com API does not work for Chrome users. Sorry.]

The youth are waiting, day after day. They wait for their time; as do the workers, even the old. They all wait, those who are discontented and those who reflect. They are waiting for a force to arise, something they will be part of; a new kind of international that will not make the same mistakes as the previous ones. They wait for a chance to get rid of the past once and for all – for something new to begin.

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8 thoughts on “The Invisible Committee – Call [Audiobook]”

Awesome. For my 23rd birthday we staged a reading of The Coming Insurrection in my apartment… we didn’t get too far, and if we had recorded it, it would have been drowned out with drunken laughter. Hail margaritas.

I’m not convinced that citizens of the traditional western economies; if it can be said any longer as others have inquired that there exists an inside or outside in that regard; have available to them some inherent power that thus far has not been able to reveal itself anywhere else in isolation, as measurably effective and autonomous responses to the comparatively exceptional social conditions which are so widely employed elsewhere as exigencies of the commodity relation. It seems as well that the act of laying in wait to accompany something that might find such agency someplace else, or waiting in anticipation for certain conditions to become generalized, bears resemblance to localized terms of conditional surrender where a few mutual acknowledgements are set down. There doesn’t appear to be anything new in waiting for others to feed themselves into the slaughter, that hasn’t been repeated throughout history and into the present as devices of intellectualized, imperial elitism.

While I tend to agree, I think it’s also important to not submit to the blackmail of philosophers who fetishize active faculties. In particular, the incessant talk of “agency” and “activism.”

Their “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” has dominated political strategy for too long. This is why Autonomia’s strategy of refusal and withdrawal was itself a positivity to wield as a weapon against the forced march of state capitalism (and not merely dialectical aikido). This is also the philosophical status of the legitimate use of the disjunctive synthesis: repulsion usually results in a perversification of attraction, not its denial.

The gamble suggested by Call is not mere quietism or a hidden power. Rather, the advice is to abandon the mass mobilization model that keeps the forced march but merely directs it toward ‘leftist ends’ (whatever they might be). This serialization of activity failed in the 1848 revolutions, the 1920s in America, the Soviet experiment, the Social elements of anti-globalization, and the global attempt to stop the Iraq War.

My suggestion, as will unfold in the coming months of my dissertation writing, is to act within the hidden underbelly of the metropolis. We already know what this activity looks like: it’s the criminal element of the proletariat that was given a political articulation by the Black Panthers; it’s the one billion slum dwellers who produce new forms of life that perplex the acolytes of global governance; and it’s a dirty politics that disgust most of the civilized citizens of the world. And in that regard, you’re right. It’s no form of power that citizens have ever enjoyed, except from the comfort of a TV screen or a trashy novel.

I think of agency in this context as something worlds removed from traditional activism as it makes itself plainly understood, which is quite dirty in its own right. Agency in a sense which could merely imply a conscious ‘scattering of attentions elsewhere’, or an ‘unplugging from the thought vacuum,’ as Patrick Dunn described it.

But I know what you mean in implicating agency and activism. I engage in conversation with a social democratic board, with all the notoriety of a pariah, where they summon activists to “share strategies, calls to action, and success stories here.”

I do actually keep “Call” in a completed reading pile by the nightstand.

To reveal my own prejudices: I disagree with the import of Call. If I understand it’s (direct, pragmatic) purpose, it was used as an appeal to French activists to join the author and move to the French countryside.

Thank you for the links. I’d certainly be interested in reading a treatment of their post-incarceration experiences, as their publisher had once suggested as a possibility. Aside from other considerations, they do write in a lovely pen.